Norms And Conditions For Women In The Elizabethan Era

As you could imagine women weren’t treated with as much respect as expected, even now some women are only considered to be trophy wives. Not only were they not allowed to vote, but they also weren’t allowed to choose their grooms. Marriages were put together to bring relevancy to the families, all because of this tying referred to as The Elizabeth Wedding.  Many brides and grooms weren’t allowed to meet until the day of their ceremony. Women had standards and if those standards weren’t met, then they were looked down upon. For example, they were supposed to be married before the birth of their first child. That was the normal procedure for creating a family. The ones who weren’t married were considered impure or some type of witch.

Throughout the Elizabethan era, men had more advantages than women. William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has characters such as Petruchio, Baptista, Katherine, and Bianca that show how men overpowered women. During the Elizabethan era, there was heavy sexism. Women were discriminated. Through Shakespeare’s language, men could speak to and about women in a disrespectful and derogatory manner. Women were voiceless and deprived of their right to speak. Women were inferior to men. During the Elizabethan era, through Shakespeare’s language, and in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, it is proven that men had more advantages than women.

Shakespeare's use of cross dressing and deceitfulness extends beyond the actual writings in the plays and goes onto the stage. Women were not allowed to perform on stage in Shakespeare's time. ."..all the great women's roles in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, from Juliet and Lady Macbeth to the duchess of Malfi, were written to be

In the sixteenth century the role of women in society was very limited. Women were generally stereotyped as housewives and mothers. They were to be married, living their life providing for her husband and children. The patriarchal values of the Elizabethan times regarded women as the weaker sex.’ Men were considered the dominant gender and were treated with the utmost respect by females. Women were mainly restricted within the confines of their homes and were not allowed to go school or to university, but they could be educated at home by private tutors. Men were said to be the ones to provide for their families financially. Women were often seen as not intelligent. Property could not be titled in the name of a female within the family. Legally everything the female had belonged to her husband. Poor and middle class wives were kept very busy but rich women were not idle either. In a big house they had to organize and supervise the servants.

It is said that Queen Elizabeth I’s controversial reign at the time informed the play’s content. She, in fact, used to like to invite theater companies to her palaces[2] and saw a performance of the play at Christmastime while on a campaign in Ireland[3]. In her medieval England, people met the idea of a female monarch with hostility[4], because there had never been one until[5] . The challenge to tradition that was Queen Elizabeth I’s reign most likely to lead the discussion of gender roles in Twelfth Night.

In John Osborne 's 1956 piece, Look Back in Anger, housewife Alison Porter is faced with the difficult decision of remaining in a toxic marriage or returning to live with her parents. Indeed, Alison is the archetype of the 1950s British woman, as depicted in both academic and popular discourse—meek, miserable and resigned to her fate as mother and housewife. While such a paradigm of the 1950s woman has long remained unchallenged, historians have begun to suggest that this stereotype is inaccurate and misleading, and overlooks the complexity of female gender roles during Britain of this era. When reviewing the literature on this topic, what emerges as a clear point of tension between academics is whether the 1950s was a static or a dynamic

In the Elizabethan period, women were subordinate to men. They were considered to be ‘inferior' beings who were controlled by their husbands, fathers or any other men in the family. Women were not allowed to hold their own opinions, views or lifestyles. Men had control of everything, some of these included money, politics, work, children, women and home.

The actors were expected to perform their own stunts. They had to have a good memory to learn and memorize their lines in a short time period. William Shakespeare acted in some of the productions of the plays. Males had to act out the female parts of the plays because females were not allowed to perform in theaters at this time. Although, all of the actors worked hard, the males who dressed up as females got paid the least; this proves they had a lot of dedication to their work. The actors help make the plays at the theater a huge success and very profitable to The Theater.

The main ideas about gender against Elizabeth’s reign were related to the Church. When she began ruling in 1558, Elizabeth immediately became Head of

Others have asserted that the roles of women in his plays were prominent for the time and culture that he lived in,his intent in creating characters to inspire much controversy. Two works, Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night, stand out particularly well in regards to Shakespeare's use of female characters. If you could examine these two plays, you would see that Shakespeare, though conforming to contemporary attitudes of women, circumvented them by creating resolute female characters with a strong sense of self.

Title goes here Gender roles in modern day society are not the same as gender roles in the Elizabethan Era. During the Elizabethan Era, only men were allowed to hold swords. Females, on the other hand, were not allowed to take up arms: instead, they spent their lives caring for children and accepting the life of a housewife. William Shakespeare alternates the gender roles between Macbeth and his wife Lady Macbeth continuously throughout the play. It was illegitimate for a women to see blood or a dead being.

The portrayal of men and women has varied in different stories throughout history. Many portray women as beautiful, deceptive, manipulative, and smart, while men are portrayed as being strong, masculine, and easily tricked. In many of the works covered in the course “Major British Writers to 1800,” men are advised to refrain from acting lustful, believed that it would harm their overall ability to succeed in whatever the characters aimed to do. An example of this is seen in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” when Gawain is deceived by Lady Bertilak in an effort to prove that Sir Gawain is imperfect. The depictions of men and women are very similar in Fantomina by Eliza Haywood, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Phyllis and Aristotle. .

Defining what a female was supposed to be and do was an act of Renaissance culture. For most of Renaissance society, women represented the following virtues which, importantly, having their meaning in relation to the male; obedience, silence, sexual chastity, piety, humility, constancy, and patience. The most important being sexual chastity and piety.

Effect: Men acted female parts. While they may have acted very well and all were accepted by Elizabethan audiences, unlike women who were not given the opportunities to act on stage until the 1600’s. The British prohibition of women actresses was ended in the reign of Charles II who enjoyed watching female actresses on stage. This also represented their lack of external independence.

“Women’s roles in the plays were acted by men or, more commonly by boys.” (Bommarito, 267). Boys were used for women’s roles because of their small figures and higher pitched voices. The boys began acting at the age of ten, learning the correct way to walk and talk on the stage. In addition they were also taught the art of applying make-up moving gracefully in the many layers of clothing that the Elizabethan women wore at that time.